Virgin Galactic is reporting that there has been an "in-flight anomaly" aboard SpaceShipTwo. The suborbital flight took off at 9:19am PDT from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California. Update: Virgin Galactic has confirmed that SpaceshipTwo has crashed and the California Highway Patrol has confirmed that there is …

Happy birthday, Internet! You may be turning 45 today, but we swear you don’t look a day over 30. And not to embarrass you, but we thought we’d celebrate by sharing some of your baby photos. Or, more accurately, perhaps some of your sonograms.

Sixty years ago today, on October 27, 1954, the Disneyland TV show debuted on ABC. The show actually existed before the theme park opened in Anaheim, California on July 17, 1955 and was in effect an advertisement for the park. But oh, what a glorious advertisement it was.

If you were an American kid in the 1950s and 60s you were bombarded with an amazing promise: one day, when you're all grown up, you'll be able to vacation on the moon. But until then you'll have to settle for space-adventure TV shows and comic books. Unless, of course, you won this real live space simulator from 1959.

I'm glad Walter Isaacson is getting such an outpouring of love from reviewers and talk-show hosts for including Ada Lovelace in The Innovators, his new history of the digital revolution.1 Thanks to Isaacson, Lovelace is finally receiving at least a few bytes of the attention she deserves for having written the first…

In space, perhaps nobody can hear your scream—but that doesn't mean that stellar travel is a silent pursuit. Now, NASA has started compiling mountains of historic space-related audio clips for us all to listen to. And there are some belters.

I’m tired of being lied to. Tired of companies exploiting my childhood dreams of riding a hoverboard just like Back to the Future Part II.When Doc Brown let me down, I was ready to write off the whole idea. But this week, my dream finally came true.

Two people were injured after a Maverick brand "flying car" crashed today in Marion County, Florida. Both reportedly escaped with minor injuries. The Maverick has been involved in at least two other accidents during testing, one in 2012 and another in 2013.

People are understandably really excited about the latest hoverboard currently being crowdfunded at Kickstarter. It's called the Hendo and it's being developed by Greg and Jill Henderson for their company Arx Pax. Is it real? Yes. Has our Back to the Future hoverboard finally arrived? Sadly, no.

Isaac Asimov was one of the great sci-fi writers of the 20th century. So naturally, at the dawn of the space age, the military wanted to tap his brain. In 1959 he was approached by ARPA (now known as DARPA) to "think outside of the box" about how ideas are formed. His brief work for the organization has never been…

As TV technology stormed into American homes during the early 1950s, more and more people started to ask, why don't we use this stuff on the battlefield? They imagined a world where commanders could remotely monitor the activity of troops on the ground — maybe even from halfway around the world.

The June 1930 issue of Science and Invention magazine featured this amazing little pocket projector. But much like other small handheld gadgets of the time, it was pretty impractical given its battery needs.

When we want to leave our mark on Mars today, we simply send over a few Rovers to roll around in its red soil. But 150 years ago, scientists had very different plans for contacting the planet, including one French inventor who wanted to use the refracted light of the sun to sear a welcoming message into the Martian…

It wasn't just the recipes that were faddish. The 1960s were halcyon times for restaurant experiences that hold almost no appeal today, from the dine-o-mat to the drive-in diner. But one curious product of this era had true staying power: the revolving restaurant.

Student researchers at MIT have concluded that given current technology, any colonists to Mars would die after about 68 days. Mars One, the company that hopes to put people on Mars by the 2025 (and film a reality TV show there, so you know they're legit) insists that the MIT researchers are wrong. But as any student…

Before the rise of synchronized sound in the late 1920s, movie theater owners tried all kinds of different ways to get words and music into the movie-going experience. They brought in enormous orchestras, they built gigantic sound effects machines, and they even tried putting voice actors behind the screen who would…

From 1967 until 1973 NASA employed the services of Raymond Loewy, a legendary figure in the design world. Loewy's firm produced over 3,000 designs for NASA during this time. And everything they produced for the space agency would fit perfectly in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey — like the Loewy space taxi…

Almost 60 years ago, we took our first steps into the big, black nothingness of space. Or more specifically, Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov had the honor of taking the very first space-dip. But this was a rush job—a means for the Soviet Union to shame the US and win the space race once and for all. Which they did! …

The March-April 1986 issue of The Futurist magazine looked at the far off, futuristic decade of the 1990s. In an article titled "Issues for the 1990s," Edith Weiner and Arnold Brown examined what they saw as the emerging concerns of the world. Well, the world as seen from 1980s America.

The fakes are everywhere. At this point, it might be easier to just point out the images on the internet that are real, rather than show you all the fakes that have been circulating recently. Then again, this way's always more fun.